


Letterbomb

by conceptofzero



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-08
Updated: 2010-10-08
Packaged: 2017-10-12 12:30:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/124835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/conceptofzero/pseuds/conceptofzero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Black Queen's snooping turns up something she really shouldn't have found. Cue shenanigans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letterbomb

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt-fill for the captchalogue request meme on LJ.

It never occurs to her that she shouldn't snoop when Jack Noir isn't at his desk. After all, she is the Queen. This is her kingdom. Nothing is off limits, especially not her underlings desks. So she takes a seat in his chair and opens the drawers one by one, looking inside to see what Jack keeps there.

The drawers are even messier than Jack's desk. At least the tickets on there are in stacks. Dozens of broken ink quills lie in one drawer, along with a stack of fresh ones. And in other drawers, she comes up with tickets and sheets of paper, and a few licorice treats that she's certain falls under contraband. The Queen leaves the licorice alone, choosing instead to pull out one of the stacks of paper.

It takes her a moment to understand what she's seeing. She's heard music, of course, but this is the first time she's ever seen it written down. The words seem quite obvious, but for the life of her, she can't figure out how the dots tell the musicians anything. She flips through the stack, skimming over the words. It is drivel by far and large; popular love songs, a few songs about how enjoyable it is to party with your friends, and another set that seems to be nothing but bragging. The songs do not say Jack Noir at the top, but she feels fairly confident in assuming he wrote them. The love songs strike her as strange, since he seems to be angry all the time, but the rest are so perfectly Jack that they aren't worth commenting on.

The Queen leaves them on the desk beside the tickets and goes looking for more items of interest. She takes hold of some of the crumpled tickets and carefully unfolds them. The reason they were discarded becomes obvious. There's a rather unflattering caricature of what the Queen can only assume is herself. She is unimpressed, but certainly not surprised. Jack is as subtle as a knife in the face.

However, there are limits to how much someone can dislike their monarch. Jack's drawing easily crosses the line between inadvisable and treasonous. She sighs. The last thing she wants to do is have Jack executed. Oh sure, he's a troublesome nasty mean-spirited little monster who can barely keep his desk clean. But he keeps the bureaucracy running, even if only because everyone is too afraid to disobey him, and if he died, then she would have to take over his position while a replacement was trained. His entire purpose is prevent her from having to deal with tedious paperwork, which gives him a certain sort of job security that no one else on the planet could ever come close to having.

She opens the drawer to put the ticket back into, with a mental note to herself to have someone else 'discover' the tickets and scare Noir into behaving properly. But as she puts the paper away, she notices something sticking to the bottom of the drawer above. It's easy for her to slip her fingers along the edges of it, finding tape and scraping at it, and finally coming away with an envelope. She wonders what would Jack would tape to the bottom of a drawer to keep hidden when he can't even manage to hide the drawings calling his Queen a huge bitch properly.

The envelope is not sealed, and she reaches inside, fishing out a number of sheets of paper. It's a letter. The Queen settles into Jack's chair and begins to read. But as she makes it through the first paragraph, she finds herself drawn into it, no longer paying attention to anything happening around her.

It's a love letter. And it may be the most beautiful thing she's ever read. She finds it hard to reconcile the writer of the letter with the man who sits at this desk and sneers at her anytime she reminds him that his reports are late, again. But the writing is the same, and here and there, she can see him in the way he turns a phrase. The letter is like a poem, and Jack lovingly describes the beauty of someone. The Queen can almost see this mystery woman: long graceful limbs, sleek as a lioness, eyes that pin you down and tear you apart.

Halfway through, it suddenly hits her: the letter is about her. A quick flip to the last page reveals no recipient, and nowhere through it does Jack call her by name. But... the descriptions are quite clear. And there are other things. The way he describes the unexpected visits ("my world tilts when you appear and I am left standing on the knife's edge") strikes her deeply, and she goes over it again and again. It's vulgar and charming and painfully honest, and all of it is focused on her.

This is… she can't even put the rest of that thought into words. She can't dare let herself think anything. Because there is no way that a Queen can end that sentence, even to herself, that won't result in someone's death or exile. It simply is.

The Queen reads it again, savoring each word the way you would savor the pain when you press your fingers into a bruise. Her heart aches a little when she reaches the end, and she has to set the letter aside, swallowing until the lump in her throat dissolves. She rests a hand on the paper, tracing the lines of Jack's writing. No one has ever written anything for her before, and it is more than she can stand.

She has no idea how long she's been sitting there when she hears the ever-so-familiar click of Jack's feet. The Queen jolts up. There's no time to replace Jack's letter, and she needs a place to hide it. She folds it up, and slips it into her shirt, carefully tucking it between her breasts. For the first time since she left the cloning chambers, she wishes she had pockets on her outfit. And then, just before Jack rounds the corner of the screens, she grabs hold of the stack of music, and flips it open to the middle, forcing her eyes to set down on a line, any line.

Jack comes into the corner of her vision and stops dead when he sees her reading his music. She flips a page, and looks over at him. When she speaks, her voice is a bit husky, but she doubts Jack can notice. His eyes are too busy fixing themselves on the music in her hands, and she can see him getting noticeably angrier just standing there. "I hope you simply brought this to work with you Jack. You know you aren't allowed to work on personal projects when you have duties to perform."

"Yes, your majesty," He grinds out between his teeth, and in her mind, she hears _my world tilts when you appear_ run through her mind.

She sets the stack of papers on the desk and gets to her feet. The paper between her breasts shifts a little, and she hopes that Jack can't see any of it. She has a moment when she can't remember why she came to his office in the first place, and she feels a bit of panic, a strange and otherwise new sensation for her. But then the words come to her, just as she opens her mouth, "You failed to turn in your weekly report."

"It's done. I've been busy," Jack steps around her, grabbing the folder off the desk and all but shoving it in her hands. She would normally address him, but right now, she can't get away from him fast enough. "Anything else, your majesty?"

Any other time, she would stop and marvel a little at how Jack's voice could warp a term of respect into one of disgust, but not this time. "Nothing," She says, and simply heads out, hoping that Jack assumes her reaction is rude instead of furtive. The Queen keeps marching smoothly onwards, trying not to think about the letter.

\--

Jack waits until she's gone before sneering and throwing a rude gesture after her. Divine ruler, his ass. He grabs the stack of music, quickly checking to make sure she hasn't removed anything. But it all seems to be there, much to his relief.

He glances at the desk. At least she only hit the top desk drawer before getting distracted. There were other things in there that could get him more than a warning. Jack's going to have to sneak out his drawings when he heads home tonight. Part of him almost wishes she had stumbled across them, but the rest of him is smarter about it and knows that a moment of spite isn't worth a hundred years of wandering through a desert.

Jack pulls the top drawer open and dumps the stack of paper back into its place. And then, just to be sure, he pulls open the middle drawer, looking to see if she had seen the drawings. It was hard to tell. Jack usually just threw them in there when he was done with them. He was probably safe. If she had seen them, there was no way that smug, superior bitch wouldn't have rubbed his face in them before throwing him to the mercy of the guards.

He flops into his seat, sighing. What a morning. It was the end of the month, so every idiot authority regulator and infraction registrar were doing their best to meet their ticket quotas, since of course they couldn't have taken the rest of the month to do that. So now Jack had a backlog that was nearly as tall as him. He'd taken time out of his day to go yell at the worst offenders and remind them that if they didn't spread their tickets out, Jack would push them out the nearest window and let them spread out all over the streets.

At least that was satisfying. He'd been in a good mood, right until the moment he walked in and caught the Queen lounging in his chair. Jack had plenty of fantasies that started like that. A few of them even featured being reprimanded about late reports, but not in a buzzkill way.

Jack grumbles and pushes his chair back up to his desk, grabbing one of the tickets and fishing around in his drawer for a new quill. He finds one, but there's a piece of tape sticking to the feathers. Jack scowls, pulling it off, and glancing in his drawer to see what the hell is going on. There are a few pieces of tape lying in there, and an envelope-

He freezes. It isn't an envelope, it's **the** envelope. The one taped underneath his drawer. The one with his letter, that stupid fucking letter that he'd written while working late one night and had left there for reasons he couldn't explain even to himself. It had been pulled off the bottom of the drawer.

Jack pulls it out and yanks the envelope open. It's empty. Only his self-control keeps him from screaming so loud that the entire floor hears. The letter is gone. If the drawings would get him exiled, that letter will get him killed. His entire body shakes with a barely contained rage, and a quickly growing panic, and he rips the envelope in two.

The Queen has it. That's the only explanation. That's why she had left so quickly with the reports. Jack can't begin to imagine what she's going to do with it. Torment him? Blackmail him? Or report him straight to the King? He swallows, already feeling the sword pressed against his throat. Jack gets to his feet, glancing down the hall. She was gone, and there was no way he could run after her and steal it back.

He yanks open his bottom drawer and sorts through the pile of junk until he finds two-way radio, channel already stuck on the Clubs signal. Jack presses the button, "Clubs, respond."

There's a moment of silence before the radio crackles to life and he gets his response, "Jack! How are you?"

"No, it's Sp- nevermind," Normally Jack would remind the Droll that his call-sign wasn't Jack, it was Spades. But there wasn't time to drive that through the Droll's thick skull. "I need you for a mission. Report here immediately."

"A mission?" The Droll can't contain his excitement, "What sort of mission?"

"A secret one. Get up here," Jack sets the radio on his desk and turns to the Fenestrated Walls. He brings up footage from the main halls, switching around until he finally finds the Queen, making her way back up the tower. As he swaps between cameras to keep an eye on her, he spots something weird in her shirt.

She stops to speak to a guard and Jack pauses the feed on a close up of her chest. It's... paper? His eyes widen. His letter. She has it folded it up and stuffed between her breasts.

He's still staring at the image when the Droll interrupts and scares the hell out of Jack, "Hi! What are you doing? Who's that?"

"Fuck!" Jack curses, glaring at the Droll. He quickly exits to live-view again, pointing to the screen, "You see the paper here? In her shirt? I need you to get that for me."

The Droll frowns. "How am I supposed to do that? It's in her shirt."

"Wait until she takes it out. Just follow her around, keep an eye on where she's going and doing. And as soon as he puts it down, you get your hands on it and you bring it right to me," Jack puts his instructions as simply as he can. The Droll isn't too bright, but he's good at what he does. If anybody can get the letter away from the Queen, the Droll can. "Got it?"

The Droll salutes. "I got it!"

"Get moving," He points the Droll in the right direction, and switches one of the extra screens to keep an eye on the Droll. Jack's guts feel like they'd been replaced by a pile of squirming snakes. If Droll doesn't get that letter, then Jack is going to save everybody a lot of time and just throw himself out the window.

\--

The Queen has duties to attend to, but she is the Queen, and if she chooses to blow off her afternoon, no one is going to question her. Only one of the guards bothers to stop her on her way back to her room, "My lady? Are you feeling well? Should I fetch the King?"

The last thing she wants is the King coming to see her. There's no way to explain why she has the love letter in her dress. "Your concern is touching, but unnecessary. I'm simply feeling tired. I would rather not have any visitors for the rest of the day."

"Of course, Your Majesty." The Guard bows, and she glides past him, and into her private chambers. She shuts the door behind her, and when she's certain she's alone, she sags back into the doors, letting out the breath she didn't know she was holding.

The Queen removes her crown from her head and the letter from her bodice, and walks into her parlor. The lush room is her domain, just as the King's study is his, and this place is the only one the King never enters, just as she never enters his study. After all, they need some privacy. The Queen settles the crown onto a stand just inside the door, and then takes a seat on her favorite sofa, folding her legs underneath her. The reports go on the seat beside her, unread, while she unfolds the letter and reads it again, taking her time.

Jack's touches are all over the pages. The words he uses, while beautiful, are also bitterly cynical. His language is occasionally vulgar, particularly the section describing what he would like to do to her, and by the time she finishes, her cheeks are flushed. The letter is exhilarating and terrifying all at once.

She can't let anyone find it. The Queen knows she should burn it, right here and now, and pretend she never saw it or had it. This is dangerous. And not just because it could get them both killed. She's the Queen. Derse is her Kingdom, and she must be loyal to it until the end. Part of the loyalty is being loyal to her husband, even if their feelings for one another are more like a fondness than actual love. Jack's letter is more like a raging tempest and she knows it will drown them both if given the chance.

The Queen turns back to the first page to read it again, one last time before she gets rid of it, when something catches her eye. She glances to the window, and finds nothing there. She frowns. Perhaps a lower pawn would tell themselves they had become confused, she is a Queen, and her battle instincts are sharp. There was something there.

She sets the letter on the reports on the sofa and climbs to her feet, walking over to the window and looking out. Her quarters are hundreds of stories high, and the ledges around the tower are very thin. Only someone very small and with excellent climbing skills would be able to lurk outside her windows. She frowns, taking another look to be sure. Then she spots it. There's something on the outside of her wall.

Carefully, the Queen steadies a hand on the wall and leans out the window to grasp it with her free hand. There's an arrow embedded in the exterior walls of the tower. Someone has tied one of Derse's banners to it, and it flutters here and there. She frowns. There are no armed troops in the Capital, and if this is an assassination attempt, it is the poorest attempt she's ever seen. The Queen grabs hold of the arrow and tugs. It won't come free. Whoever aimed it aimed well, sticking the arrow sounding inside of a crack in the wall.

She is still puzzling this mystery out when she hears the far of sound of a door slamming shut. The Queen jolts back into her chambers and looks around. The door to her parlor is ajar, and the report and letter are missing. She rushes to the door, throwing it open all the way and looking about. Whoever's stolen the letter is gone. She tightens her hands on the doorway, feeling a cold sort of rage tempered by fear.

The Queen strides out of her parlor and over to the panoptic repository, throwing open the doors. The screens around her reveal all of Derse, and the console sits squat-like in the middle of the room. She takes her seat and searches for Jack Noir. He's sitting at his desk, scowling at his Fenestrated Walls. They're showing nothing but static. He's trying to spy on her, but the Walls can't look inside of the Royal chambers.

She quickly seeks out the rest of Jack's minions. The Brute is standing guard elsewhere, while the Draconican Dignitary and the Courtyard Droll hurry down the halls together. The report folder is in the Dignitary's hands, and judging by the look on his face, he's reading the letter.

The Queen selects the Brute's area, turning on the mic and hijacking his radio frequency. "Hegemonic Brute."

The startled look on his face reveals how little he knows about the plot. He pulls out his radio and returns the signal, "Your Majesty?"

"If you value your friend's lives, intercept the Dignitary and the Droll, seize the paperwork they're carrying and destroy it immediately." She suspects Jack will destroy it, but she needs to be sure. From here, she can watch and make sure that it doesn't end up in anyone else's hands. Jack seems to trust the Draconian Dignitary, but the Queen has no such faith in him, or in the hopelessly dim Droll.

"Yes, Your Majesty." He throws up a salute, though she can hear the confused tone to his voice. She shuts the signal down and remains seated in the repository, switching the view back to Jack's other henchmen and watching carefully.

\--

"I don't think you're supposed to be reading that," The Droll has been saying that for nearly ten minutes now, but the Dignitary isn't about to start listening.

"Jack won't mind." It's a lie. When Jack finds out, he's going to go ballistic. The Dignitary doesn't care. Some things are worth risking Jack's wrath, and reading a bonafide love letter written by Jack is worth any risk. This thing is a goldmine of embarrassment and blackmail material. The prose is disgustingly purple in places.

"If he gets mad, he's going to yell at both of us," The Droll worries, and tugs on the Dignitary's jacket. "I don't want to get yelled at."

"He won't yell at you," He isn't paying that much attention to the Droll. The Dignitary flips the page, murmuring under his breath as he reads the line outloud. "'my world tilts when you appear and I am left standing on the knife's edge'. Could you be more overwrought Jack?"

"Standing on a knife would hurt," His bells jingle as he jogs to keep up with the Dignitary.

"You know what hurts? Reading this," Still, the Dignitary continues to scan through the letter, committing parts of it to memory. How Jack managed to come up with five pages of this stuff is astounding. And it's just more proof of how short-sighted Jack can be. If the Dignitary, in a moment of utter insanity, were to pour his heart out onto five sheets of paper, he would burn it the instant he sobered up. And he would never, ever, let it be in any position where it could fall into the hands of the worst person to read it.

"I wanna see." The Droll reaches for the letter, but the Dignitary holds it out of reach, "Come oooon."

"No." They pass by a number of guards, but no one pays much attention to them. The Dignitary doubts they'll get stopped. The Queen won't risk alerting anyone about the letter anymore than Jack would. They're both idiots. And judging by how they both handled this letter, they were made for one another. The Dignitary would say it was too bad that this means they'll never realize it, except that would be a blatant lie. The last thing he wants is those two combining their efforts instead of constantly working against one another.

"Pleeease?" He tugs on the Dignitary's uniform again. He's not going to get any peace and quiet to read this, and that simply isn't acceptable. The Dignitary decides to make an extra stop.

They head down the stairs and find the nearest unlocked mail room. There's already someone inside, which makes the Dignitary's plan somewhat easier. He recognizes the Authority Regulator from this morning's monthly quota session, and the Regulator clearly remembers the Dignitary, since he seems relieved. "Do you know the code to send a message to Jack Noir? I need to get these finished reports to him-"

"I can deliver them by hand." He holds out a hand to the Regulator, who happily hands over the stack of papers.

"Thank you citizen!" The Regulator says, far too sincere his own good. The Dignitary does not make a face, even after the Regulator leaves because he's not a child and he doesn't need to make faces to feel superior. Once the mail room door shuts, the Dignitary gets to work, addressing two envelopes, one for Jack's office, and the other for the Dignitary's desk.

"I wanna read." The Droll gives up on tugging on the Dignitary's uniform, taking matters into his own hands. And before the Dignitary's knows, the Droll grabs onto the stacks of paper and dumps them on the ground. He looks at the mess, as if he's shocked at how things turned out, "Oops."

"I said no." The Dignitary grabs the piles and quickly puts them into envelopes, sealing them up and dumping them into the mail chute. They'll turn up where they need to be soon enough. Once finished, he grabs the folder full of stolen reports and they head out again, resuming their journey back to Jack's office.

Not long after, someone calls his name. "Dignitary!" It's the Hegemonic Brute calling to them, coming up the stairs they're headed down. "Wait!"

"Hi!!" The Droll promptly abandons the Dignitary's side to go talk to the Brute. The Dignitary just rolls his eyes and keeps walking. Looks like Jack figured out that the Droll had come straight to him to ask for help.

The Brute gives the Droll a pat on the head and waits for the Dignitary to reach him, "What's happening?"

"Nothing." The Dignitary responds, making sure to keep his voice level, "Why?"

He glances around, and speaks in a low rumble, "The Queen called my radio. She told me to destroy whatever you're carrying."

The Dignitary makes sure to look like he's annoyed when he hands over the folder. "Fine. Here you are. Did she say why?"

"No. She just said it had to be done." The Brute glances in the folder, clearly not comprehending what he's seeing or why it would need to be destroyed.

"It's a letter!" The Droll happily volunteers, but it doesn't matter. The letter is gone. As far as the Brute can tell, the Droll is just being his usual slightly dim self.

The Brute doesn't waste any time, shredding the report up as they walk. The Dignitary doesn't bother to say a thing, but a bit of a smile plays at the edges of his lips.

\--

"OH YOU FUCKER!" Jack shouts at his Walls. Before he throws himself out of the tower, he's going to find the Dignitary and he's going to push him out first.

He grabs one of the spare regiswords and promptly heads out to the Dignitary's office, three floors down. He's going to get his hands on that parcel first, and then he's going to burn it, and kill every single living person who's read it.

There are agents and pawns everywhere, but most of them get the hell out of the way when they see Jack coming with a regisword in his hands. They don't know what exactly is happening, but they all know enough to get out of the way and find a reason to stay out of the central bureaucracy for a few hours.

And on the other side of the tower, descending her own flights of stairs, is the Queen. She doesn't carry a regisword, or a weapon of any sort, but everyone gets out of her way too. The look on her face says it all. Move, or risk facing the wrath of royalty.

They reach the Draconian Dignitary's desk at the same time, coming in from different sides. The Dignitary shares an office with three other agents, who quickly make themselves scarce when they see an Archagent and a Queen on the warpath. The envelope hasn't arrived yet.

Jack stands on one side of the desk. The Queen chooses to stand on the other. They stare down one another, the very air around them growing thick with strained silence.

He breaks it first, because he's never been very good with keeping quiet. "If you have just stayed out of my desk-"

"You're blaming this on me?" The Queen is darkly amused, but there's iron in her voice, "You wrote the letter."

"You took it with you!" Jack throws back at her, "You should have left it!"

"I didn't have time to leave it when you just barged in! You think I wanted to take it with me?" She leans on the desk, "Do you think I don't know how high the stakes are?"

"Oh yeah, you're in a real fucking bind. You've got a reputation as a huge bitch to uphold. The only thing I have to lose IS MY FUCKING HEAD!" He bellows at her.

The Queen slaps him and then Jack takes a wild swing at her with his sword. He's not fast enough. She catches his arm and twists it to the side, and then promptly slams Jack into the nearest wall. Stone isn't particularly fun to hit, and while he tries to get his senses back, the Queen leans down, speaking in that maddeningly level tone she uses when she's really pissed. "I could have taken your head a dozen times now, Jack, and I still might. You have been a thorn in my side since the day you crawled out of your tube."

"And you've been the fucking knife in mine!" He snarls, refusing to be intimidated. "It doesn't matter what I do, you're right there, making my life miserable! You're a fucking sadist!"

"You have no idea how sadistic I can be Jack. But you'll find out." She leans in close, and all it would take is an inch forward to kiss her. He's tempted to do it. It isn't like he's got anything to lose. She's seen his letter, she knows how he feels. And now, he's got an inkling that maybe it isn't as unrequited as he thought. He can see the spark in her eyes. She's thinking what he's thinking.

Just an inch...

There's the sound of a clearing throat. Jack and the Queen see the mutual flash of sudden shock and fear on each other's faces as they recognize the voice. The Queen releases Jack and straightens up, and Jack does his best to not look as if he was one impulse away from kissing the Queen in front of her husband. The Black King stands in the doorway, holding an envelope in his hands. "Am I interrupting something?"

"No." The Queen quickly responds. "I was just straightening out something with the archagent."

"I see." The King steps further into the room. He holds the envelope in his hands up so they can see it, and both Jack and the Queen do their best not to stare. "There was a crowd gathered outside attempting to listen in, as well as a rather nervous mail carrier who insisted that I bring this in."

"Yes, those reports went missing." The Queen extends her hand for them. But the King doesn't hand them over. Instead, he opens the envelope. Jack's arm is sore, but he grips the regisword tight, wondering if the Queen will back him up if Jack attempts regicide. "I'll take them-"

"If this was about the reports, then may I suggest you find a more diplomatic way to settle it? It casts an ill light on our kingdom when it's Queen and Archagent enter into a rather public spat." The King glances over the papers. Jack's heart stops in his chest, and he decides to aim for the King's legs when he makes the first strike. The Queen freezes up, not making a single sound. "I see this month's ticket quotas weren't filled."

"Yes." Jack spits out, because he's being addressed and he has to say something, "Your Majesty."

"Remedy that." He hands Jack the papers. Jack forces himself to look at them. It isn't his letter at all. It's the Authority Regulator's long-overdue report. Somehow it had gotten mixed up-

And then Jack understands. It hadn't. This was always coming here. The letter was always meant for Jack's office, where the Dignitary was likely standing at this very moment, reading through it and amusing himself at the thought of Jack and the Queen fighting over the wrong envelope.

"As for you, I had heard you weren't feeling well." The King puts a hand on the Queen's shoulder, and presses a kiss to her forehead. "Go and sleep. Don't exert yourself yelling at agents."

"Yes, of course," She says in a distant sort of voice. The King looks over the both of them, and with a nod, he leaves once more. The door shuts, and neither Jack or the Queen move for the longest time. The other agents gather at the door, speaking quietly among each other, and then decide that maybe it would be best if they don't enter while Jack and the Queen are still in there.

Jack can picture the Dignitary, sitting in Jack's chair, reading the letter and smiling that awful smug smile of his. And he knows the Queen can too from the disproving expression on her face. It's not a lot, but a mutual enemy to hate always makes things a little easier to stand.

"I'm going to kill him." Jack tells her, because he doesn't want her to go off and do it first. He's the one who'll be strangling the Dignitary to death.

"Inform me when you finish." She sits on the Dignitary's desk. It's a habit that drives Jack nuts, especially when there are perfectly good chairs all over the place. But she always sits on the desk, and all he can think about doing is-

Is something he described doing in the letter, in great detail. That fucking letter. It was just his way of purging every awful fucking thought in his head and puking it out onto paper, as if maybe by getting it out, his brain would stop conjuring those images every time she walked into the room. But it hadn't. If anything, it just made the intensity of them worse.

He can tell the exact moment that she remembers what he wrote in the letter because that's the moment she jerks up off of the desk like it's a hot stove under her ass.

She fixes him with a look, but even her narrowed eyes can't hide the slight blush on her cheeks. "Get back to work."

Jack should just stomp out of the office. But he can see that delicious tint of pink, and there's never going to be another chance. He stalks towards her, dropping the sword on the floor and grabbing her by the waist. Jack pushes, and she doesn't even resist, sitting back on the Dignitary's desk hard enough to knock over the neatly stacked paperwork and pens.

He's wanted to do this since the first time she busted his balls over a late report, and he realized that the hate in his heart wasn't pure and uncomplicated anymore. Jack puts on foot on the Dignitary's chair and steps up, grabbing onto the back of the Queen's neck. He doesn't even need to pull. She kisses him, and a dozen pens go spilling across the floor they go tumbling back onto the desk.

\--

Jack's cubical is quite nice. The Dignitary is somewhat jealous of Jack's solitude. The other agents who share the Dignitary's office know better than to bother him, but there have been days when he's contemplated killing them just so he could have the space to himself. However, space is at a premium on Derse, and he would simply have to train/kill whichever replacements were sent in.

The screens are focused on the outer hall leading to Jack's cubical, but it's been nearly an hour, and Jack still hasn't returned. It's beginning to bode ill. There is a chance that the Queen has killed Jack, which would be quite unfortunate. Or that Jack has killed the Queen, which would be far more than 'unfortunate' for all involved.

He does a mental review of his exit plans. They're all still viable. Good. He isn't the sort of man who lets the follies of others get him killed.

The Droll insisted on staying even after the Dignitary's dismissed him, and he's sitting inbetween the screens at the moment, drawing. He gave up on demanding that the Dignitary let him see the letter after the Dignitary handed over half a dozen parking citations to doodle on.

This letter is ridiculous. The Dignitary is never, ever going to let Jack live it down.

"When's Jack coming back?" The Droll asks, looking up from the tickets, "I want to show him what I made."

"He'll be back when he's back." He flips back to the third page. The pornographic bits of this aren't too shabby. But it would be better if the woman it was describing was a little more grey, and a lot less royal.

"But look! It's us!" The Droll holds up one of his drawings. It's a disgustingly cheerful drawing of Jack, the Dignitary, the Droll and the Brute holding hands, "We're all friends, and we're going to have an adventure!"

The Dignitary has no interest in having the Droll play show-and-tell with him all afternoon. He switches the screens to his own office to discover when, or if, Jack will be coming back. What he finds is something far worse than a bloody corpse. "Oh god."

The Droll looks at the scene, "Why's Jack and the Queen wrestling?"

"My desk," Is all the Dignitary can say, and he feels a blank red wall of rage rise up within him. "My desk."

"Are they fighting-" The Droll pauses, reevaluates, and comes to the right conclusion, "Oooooh. Awww."

The Dignitary gets to his feet, throwing the letter onto Jack's desk. He grabs one of the dozen spare regiswords and heads out of Jack's office. The Droll doesn't notice, flipping over a new ticket and starting a brand new drawing of Jack and the Queen.


End file.
